Great event all round. 4.5 out of 5.
A shame about the Palhares/Drwal fight being over so quickly after a slip, but the sub tenchnique was excellent (even if it was held too long).
Diaz looked good at WW. A complete clone of his brother's fighting style now.
The Wallace/Hamman fight was excellent. So entertaining. Granted, Wallace needs to drop some muscle, or keep it standing as Foxy says - he could have won that fight in the first round with the damage he was doing to Hamman's head at times.
Miller/Bocek was another great battle that was (somewhat) suprisingly close. Good fun to watch.
Fitch/Saunders was everthing we all expected. It ain't pretty, but it is effective and it works for Fitch and so you can't blame him. I do wish he'd put more into his punches from time to time, though, and at least look more damaging/trying to finish. You never know, he might finish that way, too. Based on the press conference, I don't think he's going to be next in line like he hopes. Kos/Daley I think will get it for sure.
Loved the Carwin/Mir fight. It was exactly as I'd thought it would go. And take away the time spent circling each other at the start and then almost 15 seconds of unneccesary punishment Mir took at the end, and that fight time suddenly got a lot shorter still. Carwin is one scarily powerful dude...
The main event lived up to everything the vast majority of people were expecting. GSP was awesome and Hardy was very impressive in defeat. I'm with subvertbeats on these issues: GSP is in no way diminished by fighting his stengths against his opponent's weakness - that's up to the opponent to fix, not GSP.
The only downpoint for me was that the amount of booing at times during the event was really poor - to the extent that refs were calling for action when guys were working on the floor, and Miragliotta even kept separating guys working while standing against the cage. What is up with that?! Let the guys fight!
Also, you can't rely on the ref stopping the fight on their own judgement for submissions where the guy isn't tapping. He's not tapping for a reason: either cos he can handle the pain (and damn the injury), or because the technique isn't properly applied. In both cases the fighter could end up escaping the hold, so why are we rewarding the opponent for a sub attempt that hasn't worked? Yes, the kimura GSP had in this particular fight, he did appear to let go because he was amazed/confused Hardy hadn't tapped and he knew that something was going wrong with the hold or he was just wasting energy, but if Hardy doesn't want to tap then the ref shouldn't award GSP the win prematurely. Would imagine every fight stopped like that would see an immediate appeal by the loser.
